Childhood Coping: Avoiding a Lifetime of Anxiety

Short-term social judgments that involve avoidance can contribute to the production of a habit that forecloses on later adaptation. When a child uses avoidance in one setting, and then in another, the child may have already begun the foreclosure process. Short-term decisions have long-term consequences, and to reduce anxious avoidance in youth is to increase long-range opportunities. Teaching behavioural and cognitive skills to increase social competence and adaptation will increase opportunities and increase choice. In the ideal situation, the plan is to encourage the development of coping skills, to encourage the family and the school to provide opportunities for coping, and to encourage the social system to provide the rewards that will maintain nonanxious nonavoidant behaviour. The thrust of this presentation is (a) to review and integrate behavioural and cognitive theories that guide us to understand the nature of anxiety in youth, (b) to describe intervention strategies that build childhood coping, and (c) to consider the necessary environmental changes that are needed to maintain treatment-produced gains.